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Recently several of the budget market hosting providers have been in a bidding war to offer the most disk space and data transfer for under $10/month.

One of my “colleagues,” if you will, in the industry spoke out about his Company’s decision.

Our customers are clearly capable of differentiating Network Redux from the budget warfare taking place in the shared/budget hosting community.

The comments from that above referenced link, indicate to me that the bidding war between budget providers has become one of who can oversell their resources at the quickest rate, rather than who can differentiate themselves in the market from their competition.

We are differentiating ourselves by providing services the budget/shared markets are

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I know how much a server and data transfer costs, as well as the costs associated with power and cage space. Realistically there aren’t many shared/budget providers that own and/or operate their own infrastructure. Herein is the difference between Network Redux and these budget level providers.

I can officially say that we are not competing in this budget/shared market to the current dishonest degree others are pursuing. We are offering a level service with realistic price points which we can honestly maintain. This doesn’t mean that expansion is out of the question, in terms of the commodity items: disk and transfer — drives grow, SAN’s reduce in price, data transfer prices reduce, all of which will allow for the gradual and eventual increases in our services.

A self sustaining business is one that very few can frown upon. The common trend for the budget/shared market is the constant need for continued business and promotion driven sales. Attrition rates for companies of this nature do not allow for an organically evolving organization.

The business I run is quite different. Organic growth with a customer centric focus, allowing our customers to grow their businesses within our business is how we elevate our revenue growth and consistently maintain low attrition numbers.

The next step in our operations will be to fully differentiate our service offerings via our public website. More to come on that.

I came across a Slashdot article last week discussing a community in Sweden’s inability to use the Windows Vista operating system with their Internet Service Provider:

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/7081/

As a Linux user, this situation is entirely frustrating.

- Promoting free and open source software does not mean impeding on the ability for other Operating System’s to “talk” in the same network environment. The linux community I have come to know and respect would not find this behavior to be acceptable in any form.

- These situations bolster claims regarding the zealous nature of Linux administrators, and the ISP in question should be embarrassed by their behavior.

I cannot disagree further with this ISP’s unwillingness to cooperate with users, or microsoft, in order to resolve this situation in an expedited manner.

Prelude, if you will, my course of study at the University of Portland drifted (in true system administrative style), from Economics to Business Finance, to the eventual Computer Science, right back to Economics at Portland State University.

Network Redux creates system administrators. And to adequately define the system administrator:

Paramount — Jack of all trades

Network Administration - Layer 2/3/4 administration on whatever platform or IOS thrown our way. This doesn’t mean dictionary style memorizing of syntax, mind you, the ability to navigate a networked device, manage its purpose and instruct it via command line accordingly is what we are referencing.

Hardware Administration - Build, rack, cable, replace parts — know thy chassis. This starts somewhere at the age of 10-12 when you are building your first PC from newegg/mwave parts. Hardware administration goes well beyond a 1/2/3/4U chassis, it delves into any component capable of fitting into a Rack (and currently this would include a Mac Mini or Mac Pro per discussions with Adium :P)

Cabling - Crimp some cables, and physically route them, intelligently. A sign of great cable management is the ability to introduce a component to the network without having to undo all work which has been previously done. Ladders are helpful but not your best friend. Getting up close and personal with the doors off is a true testament to solid cabling infrastructure.

Storage — DAS (NFS Host), iSCSI, FC, dabble in them all, professionalize in one or two. Storage + Virtualization is going to be the name of the game as time progresses, start by learning your RAID and disk recovery fundamentals and go from there.

Virtualization — Just pick one. Mine has been Xen. I prefer para-virtualized environments, more specifically the Xen implementation — there are pros and cons to every solution out there.

Operating System — Personally, I’ve worked in both Windows and Unix environments. A system administrator doesn’t have the benefit of picking or choosing his game. Interchangeable parts ARE the name of the game. Your unisex translation is Samba, your unfortunate must know is Active Directory and Unified Messaging, your fortunate savior is any system ending in NUX. Do not rely on a GUI unless you are linux administrator forced to work within the confines of an AD environment. Even then, 2007 features such as those from Exchange are breeding command line atmospheres which will look second nature to your avid Unix administrator (aside from the other nuisances associated).

Programming — You made it to 300 level computer science, pat yourself on the back. You aren’t a programmer and you never will be. Your tools are bash, Perl, Python, PHP (if you’ve had too much wine that evening) and Ruby. Your skills should allow you to write 10-15 lines of code in either language to accomplish a task such as cleaning up the mess the Windows Administrator left when he discovered a shell.

Power — Understanding that 80% rule is imperative, defining your own 65% rule is even better. This is an area which has kept me up late at night, let the system administrator determine his path of pursuit in this arena whether that be DC/AC or all worlds. Be safe, and read the documentation and always ask for help from an electrician (you are not an electrician!).

Community — Your knowledge is power, you share this knowledge with others. You are an expert in 1-2 fields. You are not an expert in all fields which you work, though you would have some convinced otherwise. Your community is your base for learning, sharing and generally having a good time.

Apple — At this point in your career you’ve likely had (haven’t we all) a “primary” linux desktop soon to be replaced by OSX. Fear not, OSX is the system administration OS if there ever was one. Gorgeous UI allowing you to interface with those web applications necessary to complete day to day tasks, with an underlying BSD sandbox where Unix tools are abundant and plentiful.

What is wonderful about the system administrative role is that there are dozens of sub categories per topic described. Every sysadmin picks his own category for expertise and runs with it.

The most important point I would stress to the system admins reading this article, do not stress about what you do not know. Strengthen what you do know, and spend time on those areas you find weakest. Your strength as a sysadmin sits in a few areas of administration where you know the application better than the developer’s themselves — you know the infrastructure down to every individual cable.

System Administration is a fine pursuit for any talented technician or software engineer. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is where the very best stand out.

The Dell “users” vocalized their need for a linux based solution on Dell desktops. Dell responded loud and clear with a decision to provide Ubuntu Linux on several of their entry level platforms.

Dell has the luxury of once again experimenting with markets otherwise thought of as economically questionable and/or uncertain. They tried it several years ago and retracted the offerings in lieu of significantly lacking user interest in desktops built with the Linux OS.

As a former Red Hat linux desktop user, don’t count me in as one to be in line to buy a Dell desktop running Linux. Why should I? I can buy a Mac mini reasonably priced running a spectacular BSD premised operating system called OSX, that meets all of my usability and aesthetic requirements.

OSX provides me with just about every tool necessary for the 2007 user experience, as well as the unix power tools to complete my day to day system administrative tasks in operating a linux based organization.

How much traction will this desktop linux push have? I really don’t have my mind set in any specific direction; I’m not a desktop linux advocate. I’ve tried, and discovered OSX.

Linux is an excellent server operating system, the best I’ve had the privilege of working with. OSX is an outstanding desktop operating system, again, the best I’ve had the privilege to work with.

It will be thoroughly interesting to see how the desktop linux push takes shape following the Ubuntu/Dell pact. I won’t pretend to speculate on what could very well be a giant leap for desktop linux. I just hope this is a true upturn for the platform, and not another method for a vocal minority to turn the tides against Microsoft’s Vista.

We recently started purchasing a handful of the first opteron based server in Dell’s line, the PowerEdge SC1435. An upgrade to the previous 1425, this server came on our radar due to a significant array of improvements:

Full Spec sheet: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/sc1435_specs.pdf

2 Socket Opteron 2xxx
8 Memory slots (Maximum 32GB DDR2 667Mhz)
Hardware RAID controller (entry level card)
SATAII (Maximum 2×750GB) or SAS drives (Maximum 2×300GB 15K)
Onboard Dual Broadcom GigE NICs or PCIe Dual Intel 1000PT NICs

Not to be confused with a mid-range server, this entry level build throws quite a punch at incredibly competitive price points.

This server is designed for web serving and HPCC, we’ve found success both in web serving and Xen virtualization to date. Disk IO performance is adequately sub-par, but this is not the system you would buy to power a high reliability mysql or NFS server.

What is this server missing? Hot swappable disks and redundant dual power supplies. But as I said, this is an entry level box at an entry level price point. Step into the mid-range 1950/2950 for these added components and improved disk IO.

CentOS 5 is a cloned version of the Red Hat Enterprise 5 Advanced Platform.

- No limit on CPU sockets
- No limit on virtualized guests
- Includes storage virtualization and cluster suite support

CentOS is the ideal platform for organizations which do not require technical support from the north american vendor otherwise referred to as Red Hat, Inc.

Don’t misconstrue my comments, Red Hat is a fine organization. They are a well fit glove and finely tuned machine for medium and large businesses which require certain levels of infrastructure and platform support, and which can also afford hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in system licensing.

My main interest in the RHEL/CentOS 5 releases was a production ready Xen environment, stabilized for the hardware platforms we run on. To date we’ve been utilizing Fedora Core 5 in conjunction with Xen 3.0 which has put our organization in a handful of technically precarious positions on more than one occasion, requiring quick troubleshooting and retroactive/proactive patching.

Initial reactions to Xen on CentOS 5 have been nothing short of stellar. Aside from some initial driver related problems with our Dell hardware raid controllers and the file system builds within guest images, the performance and stability provided by CentOS5 guests have been well improved over our experiences with FC/Xen.

One of my favorite past times involves installing different operating systems with a small, yet very real chance that I may switch to that OS for a desktop environment.

Tooling around isn’t as much fun these days when we have a network of over 50 very powerful servers, many of them Virtualized environments allowing anyone on our team to toy at will.

I’ve never had the chance to experience Debian, and while my wife and I had an evening of Law and Orders in the TV room I grabbed the netinstaller ISO for Debian 4.0 and went at it.

The ISO was approximately 150MB in size, parallels picked it right up, and I had Debian running in under 30 minutes. The installer was a breeze and the desktop environment reminded me of the good old days when the linux desktop was my primary choice. It still seems to have that rough around the edges slash are those fonts anti aliasing or do they just look bad, initial appearance…

It doesn’t seem to mind running as a 256MB VM, and hopefully I’ll have some time in the weeks ahead to delve into the UI further.

The order sits in queue, $239.40.

Reverse IP address is for a server at a competing web host. A simple glance from anyone in our organization yields a click of the delete button as this order is clearly fraudulent. Not just the reverse lookup, viet-server.com as the domain name and a questionable free email account gives us a 99.99% probability of fraudulent activity.

As a web host, how can we quantify this derelict behavior?

The google adword click cost roughly $4.00. Is that our total cost of dealing with fraudulent business?

What about the rare exceptions that slip through the cracks? The fraudster has used a proxified IP address in the same city as the card holder, has gone above and beyond to slide through the cracks of virtual, yet very real theft.

In our business it is $15.00 per chargeback plus the monies received. It is also the temporary yet devastating impact those very rare excecptions can have if allowed onto our shared network.

In retrospect, the pains suffered by the merchant pale in comparison to those of the cardholder who must salvage their money and credit ratings, where identify theft has occured.

Mark Mayo at Joyent has an interesting rant regarding recent issues with their Sun deployments:

How to completely ruin a great piece of server kit (regarding the Sun X4200 M2)
By Mark Mayo

And Ben Rockwood adds his frustration:

Getting Fed Up With Sun: Can’t Get Systems, Breaking Existing Ones

I previously put in a few words regarding my experience, or attempt at an experience, with the Sun group:

Dell vs. Sun, or Sun vs. Consumer?

Frustrations are clearly brewing for the sysadmins at Joyent. And I don’t blame them. Standardizing a stack of their magnitude requires standardization of your server storage and networking infrastructure. Throw in a wrench to part of that equation, as Sun appears to have, and you potentially have a recipe for mutiny.

-Thomas

The usual mid-week gem in the office is the weekly InfoWorld print magazine in my bundle of mail. This week’s edition came as an unexpected surprise described by the editor as a Farewell to ink

At my desk resides what will be the last print issue of Infoworld, and on my desktop now resides a bookmark link to Infoworld.com.

Very frustrating, allow me to explain.

I’ve avoided infoworld.com on most occasions due to the horrendous layout of the site, the extremely slow page loads, and the enormous volume of paid advertising littered everywhere (which in turn result in the slow page loads).

This post follows my attempt to read an article on the Dell PowerEdge series while an ad in the middle of the page moved jarbbled text in repeated circles, attempting to sway my attention, which it did, with no method of disabling it.

I’ve been an avid reader of infoworld (print version) for close to six years now. Give me a subscription method to infoworld.com minus a majority of the annoying ad space and I will jump right in. No different than a subscription to the wall street journal, the content of Infoworld.com is an excellent read. I just cannot read an article while an ad sits in the middle of the page in nonstop motion.